Arocena argues globalization lifted global poor, departing from dependency theory

CSIS tabletop exercise found Russia, China pursue distinct playbooks in region

A spring 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies posed a question that Arocena said would have sounded strange a decade ago: whether Russia and China could coordinate to challenge U.S. influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The CSIS report, based on a tabletop exercise centered on a hypothetical Venezuela crisis, concluded that Moscow and Beijing pursue “very different playbooks” in the region even when their interests overlap, Arocena wrote.

That kind of geopolitical analysis, Arocena argued, belongs to a vocabulary that many Latin American intellectuals were never taught. For much of the 20th century, the region’s political economists were trained to interpret international trade through the language of imperialism — an argument rooted in Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and later refined in Latin America through Dependency Theory, which trained generations of economists and diplomats to see foreign capital as an extension of conquest.

Arocena acknowledged that the region’s history includes “real exploitation and foreign intervention,” but argued it would be “equally unserious to treat all trade and investment as disguised imperialism.” That habit, he wrote, has left parts of the region without the vocabulary to describe two authoritarian powers with distinct, sometimes rival ambitions in the same hemisphere.

The analysis noted that Joseph Schumpeter challenged the economic theory of imperialism more than a century ago. In “Imperialism and Social Classes,” published in 1919, Schumpeter argued that imperialism was not a natural expression of capitalism but a residue of older warrior states and aristocratic habits. Raymond Aron later warned against reducing international conflict to a single economic cause, according to Arocena.

The decades after 1980 further complicated the old theories, Arocena wrote. China began opening its markets in 1978, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. World Bank estimates showed that less than 9% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted that progress. Arocena argued those gains came from commerce and the gradual integration of more people into the global economy, not from colonial conquest.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, following its 2014 annexation of Crimea, illustrated a different dynamic, Arocena wrote. He described the invasion as a war of territory and imperial ambition reflecting a worldview in which borders remain negotiable when great powers claim historic rights over smaller neighbors — not primarily a war to secure markets.

The tragedy of Ukraine, Arocena wrote, is that the logic of commerce failed against an older imperial instinct. The lesson, he said, is not that trade was naive, but that trade alone cannot restrain rulers who think in terms of destiny and territorial restoration.

Arocena wrote that Latin America’s sovereignty is “not strengthened by romanticizing authoritarian powers, nor is it weakened by trading with China, Europe and the United States at once” — provided the region does not pretend all three share the same political values. He said the region needs a vocabulary that can defend sovereignty without romanticizing authoritarian power, and welcome commerce “without mistaking it for a complete theory of peace.”

Arocena is a Uruguayan writer and researcher on ideological influences in the West, author of “Gramsci: su influencia en el Uruguay,” and a member of the teaching faculty of the Legacy of the Americas Academy of Advanced Studies.